Often, product manufacturers receive customer orders specified in electronic files including Computer Assisted Design (CAD) models. A need exists for methods and apparatus to support the prediction of appraisals and production alternatives related to manufactured products, including times, manufacture methods, and costs incurred in manufacture processes. Many manufacture companies rely on human experience alone or have no standardized methodologies to predict appraisals and other aspects associated with the manufacture of products. Relying on human experience alone can result in inaccurate predictions and can lead to inconsistencies across appraisals and other predictions made by different human estimators with respect to similar or identical products. Moreover, the lack of reliable objective manufacture appraisal or predictive tools can prohibit the optimization of manufacturing processes when such processes are executed for a first time and/or the conditions in which such manufacturing processes were executed change over time.
Thus, a need exists for methods and apparatus for reliable manufacture analysis tools to accurately predict aspects associated with the production of products specified in CAD or other digital-based models that can vary over time or can depend on exogenous variables.